PICA-X
X heat shield could withstand
hundreds of returns from low Earth orbit; it
can also handle the much higher energy
reentries from the moon or Mars.
Musk, who is SpaceX’s chief designer as
well as its CEO, is involved in virtually
every technical decision. “I know my
rocket inside out and backward,” he
says. “I can tell you the heat treating
temper of the skin material, where it
changes, why we chose that material,
the welding technique…down to the
gnat’s ass.” And he pushes his people to
do more than they think is possible.
“There were times when I thought he was
off his rocker,” Mueller confesses. “When I
first met him, he said, ‘How much do you
think we can get the cost of an engine
down, compared to what you were
predicting they’d cost at TRW?’ I said,
‘Oh, probably a factor of three.’ He said,
‘We need a factor of 10.’ I thought,
‘That’s kind of crazy.’ But in the end,
we’re closer to his number!”
Musk’s relentless pushing has paid off. A
recent study by NASA and the Air Force
finds that it cost about $440 million for
SpaceX to get from a blank sheet of
paper to the first Falcon 9 launch (a
figure, Musk says, which also includes
most of the Falcon 1 development). If
NASA had done the same thing, with its
management structure and traditional
use of aerospace contractors, the study
finds, it would have spent three times that
much.
If SpaceX’s progress sometimes seems like
a 21st century replay of NASA’s early
history, that’s partly because the
t
company has greatly benefited from the
space agency’s vast technical archive.
“We’re standing on the shoulders of
giants,” Mueller says. “With the Apollo
program they learned so much. And we
can get access to all that. We use that
tremendously. A private
privat company in a
vacuum could not do what we did.”
But as for SpaceX’s organizational style,
it’s Silicon Valley, not NASA, that had the
most influence. In Hawthorne, where
everyone including Musk works in
cubicles instead of offices to encourage
communication,
on, the buzzwords of the
business culture—lean
lean manufacturing,
vertical integration, flat management—
management
are real and fundamental. Says former
SpaceX business development director
Max Vozoff, “This really is the greatest
innovation of SpaceX: It’s bringing the
standard practices of every other industry
to space.” Having almost all of SpaceX’s
engineers under one roof means the
process of designing, testing, and
improving is greatly streamlined. One
NASA manager who visited SpaceX quips
that when there is a new problem
p
to
solve, “it looks like a flash
mob” in the hallway.
Some
observers
have
questioned whether SpaceX’s
smaller workforce can build
and operate a vehicle safe
enough for astronauts to fly
(see “Is It Safe?” April/May
2009). But former astronaut
Ken Bowersox,
wersox, who joined